The Crystal Cabinet
by Miiko Ashida
Summary: Five things that never happened to Riku. He's standing in a shadow he can't get out from under and it's swallowing him alive. Life in a fishbowl and the only one you'd show on purpose won't look.


Their house was small and innocuous, happy-looking as it was tucked away into its little patch of mainland suburbia. The yard was trimmed, flowers carefully chosen by color in accordance with the house color – pale yellow. There was a fence hedging in the yard, and it was tall and sturdy enough to say 'our home is ours, a respite from the world', to maintain a personal but not unneighborly distance, yet diminutive enough that it was still friendly, just a detail nobody would notice (separations of that kind are always subtle and Riku has grown up knowing it). The windows were clean of any smudges or dust; light passed through unhindered and sparkled on the glass shelves and china cabinet in the front room.

Riku's mother took pride in her windows, in her home. Riku's father took pride in her. In a word, their life was charmed. It was the good life, and they were any young couple's dream future-family. Something you only see in commercials for clothing detergent or a disposable camera.

There was nothing personal about their life, you see. They were on display in a crystal cabinet as clean as the windows: on display and almost reach-out-and-touch-it real, but closed off completely. It would be perfectly easy to say they were a private family, but they were really just detached.

At nighttime the shades closed and Riku's mother cried. Shelves sometimes broke and glasses cracked; there was always money to replace them. Riku's father didn't like his wife so much when the neighbors weren't around. Sometimes things that weren't shelves or cups cracked, snapped, shattered and crashed. Riku's mother screamed and Riku learned to fall asleep to the rhythmic smack-thump-thud of flesh-on-flesh, flesh-on-countertop, body-on-floor. He learned to sleep with a pillow over his head, and he learned to live with his ears and eyes closed.

Sleeping in a glass house was hard, even for Riku in his dark, silent head.

And always the good one, always perfectly aware of the eyes outside his glass cabinet, Riku shut the blinds but inside it was still a combat zone.

* * *

He knew it was selfish but sometimes Riku wondered when his mother would get tired of being brave and living in a fishbowl, and he wondered when too much would become 'I've had enough'.

It was enough when his mother wasn't around one afternoon and his father closed the blinds. A seven-year-old arm broken in three places (and aren't children just so resilient? look how they grow and adapt past these things!) was enough. A beating she wasn't there to take or stop or drag out into the open (she likes to think that's what she would have done if she'd been there) was enough.

Her son was enough.

So they packed everything, left at night and took a big steamer to a chain of islands too small to put on most maps. The night air was cold but it wasn't stifling so Riku breathed it in, deeper than he'd ever tried to breathe before, and loved how it burned his lungs with chill. His coat didn't keep him from shivering so his mother bought him a hot cider and they shared it, her holding the cup because he wasn't used to doing things one-armed, and she told him how life was going to be so much better here.

There wasn't much money but there were plenty of jobs and small houses for rent, so Riku's mother found one of each and they moved in.

Across the street, there was a shabby, dingy cream-colored house with flowers that clashed hideously in its unmown lawn and a crooked welcome sign hung on the door. Riku liked that house. What he liked better was the little, brown-haired tawny-skinned boy in the yard, pulling up flowers and stuffing them in his hair.

While his mother unpacked and avoided neighbors, Riku crossed the street (here there was almost no traffic, so no one had to hold your hand) and sat down on the wild grass next to the wild, brown boy. The boy gasped and tugged at Riku's hair, eyes wide with an amazement they'd never lose no matter how many worlds they saw, giggling and grabbing more flowers, roots and dirt everywhere, to tangle in with the silvery strands. Riku smiled like someone let out of a prison cell into the sun for the first time in fifty years and picked a handful of flowers of his own.

He showed the boy how to weave them into a ring, and put it around the boy's neck. It was almost magic to be young and just starting to live, and Riku wanted to pull the curtains open farther than the width of his windows. He wanted someone to see inside, wanted this boy to see him. The glass cracked a little.

"I'm Sora," said the boy, with a sunny smile like he said everything else. He picked up a clumsy flower-chain of his own and placed it over Riku's head.

"Riku," replied Riku, and he'd never smiled so much in one day.

* * *

They raced.

Riku's heart pumped, and Sora was a little out ahead of him; scrawny brown legs as big around as they'd been when he was six, a patchwork of scabs and bruises, were working the pedals furiously. At the end of the road were two houses, facing one another. At the closer of two gates, Riku was going to lose the race. You can't look up to someone you've beaten.

Adrenaline burst like so many bags of smuggled cocaine into Riku's veins, and he surged forward, passing Sora, passing the gates – both of them – passing his mother doing laundry in the yard in front of a house with dirty windows and scolding him for going to fast, look out, you'll wreck yourself and that brand-new bike –

But he skidded to a stop, and Sora skidded into him, legs over back over face and elbows and knees everywhere, not a soft spot on him except for his stomach. Riku's head found that, settled there comfortably, and he ignored how pointy Sora-bits jabbed everywhere else on him. They lay in a heap, breathing together, couldn't breathe unless they breathed together. Sora coughed. Without any malice, Riku pinched him and they squirmed but settled down again. Their legs lay inextricably locked like the stems of daisies, Johnny-jump-ups, hyacinths and pansies. Faces red with exhilaration, slack with its exhaustion, they moved a bit more until they lay cheek to cheek, hair mixing and fingers twining, breath cooling one another's skin in puffs, like a sea-breeze.

When he got his breath back, Riku said, "You're such a _girl_, Sora," and flicked the other's nose. He tugged the shades open a little wider and wished Sora would see what he meant.

Then he wouldn't have to say it. _You still need me, Sora._

"C'mon. Let's go get ice cream."

Sora stood eagerly, unaware of the moment that passed by. Riku followed, ignoring things that cracked and buckled under all the wishing. They got on their bikes again, and rode together.

It was not a race, but Sora still wound up ahead. Riku never let him know how hard it was getting to keep up.

* * *

She came when they were thirteen and fourteen, at the end of a blissful summer full of bike rides and ice creams and almost-moments. She was beautiful and Riku realized it not with appreciation but with something like dread, that this beautiful girl was a rival-who-was-not-a-rival, who didn't have to obey the rules of rivalry; that she could tangle up with Sora a different way and have to do nothing to earn it; by being a girl, and being beautiful, she broke all the rules, skipped over difficulties and reaped benefits Riku sweated and bled just to glimpse. Her name was Kairi.

Sora introduced himself with the smile he gave everything, the cheer and ease with which he loved people and trusted people. "I'm Sora!"

"I'm Kairi," she giggled, and just like that Riku knew he had lost.

Kairi wanted to be 'one of the boys'. She wanted to play with them, to fight with them, to do and be everything with them. Probably without knowing it, she wanted Sora to be unable to breathe unless it was with her, wanted to breathe only when Sora breathed. But she had to earn that. Riku let her play with them the first time.

It was easy to snip in under her unpracticed guard and nick her side, her knees, her pale-peach shins. It was easy to beat her back with relentless attacks until her rail-thin arms wouldn't hold up her sword anymore and he knocked her back into the water where she emerged, gasping and drenched with seawater-stringy hair. (Are you watching, Sora? Do you see? I'm showing you how much better I am because I'm afraid you just won't see it. She looks pretty good if you don't know I'm better.) When she climbed back to her feet he hit her again; she shrieked and it might have been a little too hard but he hit her again while her guard was broken (something Sora was especially susceptible to but which Riku never pulled on him) and saw red blooming, not in his head. His arm lashed out, wooden sword cracking through the air fast enough to make a whiplike noise (it's too fast if you can hear it, Sora; it'll draw blood, maybe break bones: don't ever hit anybody like that unless they're _really_ after you, okay?) and then –

Sora whimpered, slipped and fell into the water. Riku caught him, and Sora stared at the two halves of his sword where Riku had struck it – he'd felt those tremors in his bones, and even that had hurt – not with his wide-cornflower-blue-eyed amazement but with shock and a little fright.

He squirmed out of Riku's grasp and turned to Kairi.

"Are you okay, Kairi?"

She nodded shakily and brushed a hand through her hair. Her forearm was bleeding. There were bruises on her legs and her shirt was ripped where it had caught a splinter on Riku's sword. And he hated her more when Sora hugged her and made him apologize, because he'd ruined her and she was still beautiful.

She forgave him with a stoic smile. Sora was harder, but Riku cried a little and it wasn't on purpose to melt him but it worked that way anyway, and they ended up spending the night in their treehouse together and they talked but not about Kairi, and it was sort of over.

From then on when they play-fought it was just him and Sora, with Kairi the referee, and Riku never even left a bruise again.

* * *

"What'd you want to talk about?" Sora asked, smiling. He was as brown as he had been that first summer, his skin a golden-bronze even in the dark of the secret-place-cave. He leaned against the rock wall, short and still scrawny. The kind of person you want to hug and hug until nothing that can hurt them exists anywhere in the world.

"I don't know. Nothing, I guess."

"We should get back to the raft, then. Kairi's waiting."

"She can wait, right?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"If it's me, you'll let Kairi wait, right? Because I always wait when it's her. So she should wait for me once in a while. Isn't that fair, Sora?" Anger flared in his voice and Riku flinched to hear it, stifling himself a little. "Sora…"

"Are you mad at her?" the smaller boy cocked his head.

"No. I just…I miss you."

"I'm right here, Riku!"

And then Sora did something he hadn't done on his own in at least a year. He reached out and wrapped his arms around Riku, drawing himself up against a firm chest. There still wasn't a single soft place on Sora's body, but it felt nice – it fit. Riku hugged him back. "We're such girls," he whispered and the bitterness was lost on Sora, who laughed.

"I'm the only girly one, right? Come on, I need a manly role model! You can't be all weak now."

"This trip is making me think too hard."

"Huh? What about?"

"You. Us."

"You-me-Kairi us, or you-me us?"

"Both. Everything. I've really screwed up, Sora. This trip, it was supposed to be just you and me. And that paopu? I gave it to you to share with her because I knew if it was with _her_, you'd definitely try some, but I took a bite first so you wouldn't notice, like maybe if you ate some after that it'd be the same as us sharing. If I tried to share it with you, straight out, you'd refuse."

"Riku – "

"Sora, it's all about you. I love you, Sora."

"Oh, I love you, too, Riku; you know that, but I don't see what all this has to do with Kai—"

And Riku breathed sunlight in the dim, dusty air of the cave as he pressed his mouth softly to Sora's. It was brief and for a moment he thought it might be longer, thought he felt Sora's lips move in compliance against his own, but in the end it was just a confused boy half-forming a word of surprise or rejection.

They broke apart with a muted popping sound, and Riku tried to tug Sora close again. He wanted to apologize for the kiss (it wasn't really much of a kiss, though), but he wanted another one. He put his hands on either side of Sora's face and it was maybe the fourth time in his life that he'd cried. His hands over his eyes and ears could block out a lot of things but he let himself experience what happened next, as he folded Sora against himself and leaned down like a parched man toward water:

Sora smiled but gently pushed Riku away, and his eyes said 'no'.

* * *

The blackness gaped before him, vast. A voice spoke out of it. It spoke in a man's deep baritone, but over and beneath and inside of that were other voices: his father, his mother, his own. Sora.

And then he listened.

It asked him: Which will you chose – the darkness or the light?

Sora was light, of course, but Kairi was light, too. And maybe darkness could extinguish her. It was an enticing thought. And somehow Riku just couldn't force the blinds open to let enough light in.


End file.
